Before the billions and the boardroom rows, there was a Burnley boy whose father laid tarmac and whose mother traded antiques.
Matthew Moulding was born in 1972 and went to a Catholic high school in Colne. Two trades, both about buying something and making it worth more. He studied industrial economics at Nottingham, then qualified as a chartered accountant, the safest road a clever lad from Lancashire could take.
Soon the pair were building web stores for others, including Asda, Tesco and WHSmith.
He took it. He ended up as finance chief of the distribution business at the Caudwell Group, working close to John Caudwell, the mobile phone tycoon. A salaried seat beside a founder is a good place to learn what founding costs.
Then he left. In Manchester in 2004, with a £500,000 investment and a partner, John Gallemore, he began selling CDs and DVDs online. Soon the pair were building web stores for others, including Asda, Tesco and WHSmith. It looked like a business. Then the iPhone arrived in 2007 and the ground shifted. One profile says those years nearly ruined him financially.
What nobody outside the company noticed was the pivot hiding in the wreckage. Instead of renting out their software, they started buying the shops. Zavvi in 2009. Lookfantastic in 2010. Myprotein in 2011. Each brand ran on the platform they had built, and the platform got better with every one.
The price came later. THG sued Myprotein's former owner, Oliver Cookson, and lost, with the Court of Appeal dismissing its challenge in March 2016.
The flotation on 16 September 2020 was the peak. It was the largest London listing since 2013, and shares rose 25% on day one. Moulding received at least £830m in shares. Then the market turned. Shares fell over 60% by October 2021, investors questioned property deals in which he sold assets to himself and leased them back, and Charles Allen replaced him as chairman in March 2022. He stayed as chief executive.
The company has since shrunk to fit its shape: luxury sold to Frasers in 2024, the technology arm demerged in January 2025. Revenue was £1,717.9m for FY2025, with net income of £54.1m.
The lesson is not about scale. It is that the boy from a tarmac family learned the accountant's rule early, that you can survive almost anything except running out of cash, and then he spent two decades testing how far a founder can bend it before the board bends back.